Talk:Normalized Random Numbers (3.5e Variant Rule)

Actual Discussion

This means that each player needs to have their own pack, which can be problematic. Wouldn't it be easier to just use 2d10 instead, since it's a lot more bellcurved? --Ghostwheel (talk) 23:07, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Bellcurves are not the same as guaranteed rolls. It also means you need to mess around with crit ranges (since 20 becomes 1/100). The whole point is to make it so that there is no doubt that at some point you'll get a 20. Also, having your own pack of cards is the same as your own set of dice: not a big deal imo. --Aarnott (talk) 00:28, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

This does have some problems with rolls having various levels of significance, since you can game the system by making checks or attacks until you have a deck where there are only 10 cards left, and they're all black. And D&D supports montages, so I'm pretty sure that saying "before entering the room, Elthus practices his coin trick until the Normalized RNG has only 10 cards in it, and they're all black" is a fairly legal thing to do.

Making everyone share a deck would solve that, but I suppose you'd say that a monster getting a crit on a player isn't as lucky as a player getting a crit on a monster. --Foxwarrior (talk) 04:05, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, the montages can be solved by making the deck only pertain to combat rolls, for a particular character. That way one player doesn't hog all the 20's and they also can't do the whole "I'll make knowledge checks as a free action until my deck is all black cards". Basically, the way I envision this happening is that each player has their own deck of cards that acts as their d20 for combat, for the session. Maybe saving throws out of combat as well (like traps). The DM also has a single deck for all the monsters. The order of the cards still gives that randomness that dice are used for in the first place, but the whole gambler's fallacy pains are reduced because the distribution is fixed to what the average distribution is supposed to be. The luck can be if the right card comes up at the right time, which is already something that matters with dice, but in this case, you won't have bad things happen 20 times in a row. --Aarnott (talk) 15:18, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Situation Normail

Normailized... normailized? Is that spelling intentional? --Ganteka Future (talk) 05:45, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Funny thing is that I came up with this idea when I was writing a custom random number generator for a a game I'm working on. I spelled it wrong there too. --Aarnott (talk) 15:21, 23 January 2014 (UTC)